Immigrant workers are the unspoken backbone of the building and construction trades in cities across America – on landscape and parks projects, on residential and commercial buildings and yes, even on public and infrastructure projects.
These workers endure some of the most precarious and physically harsh working conditions of nearly any industry. All while regularly dealing with labor and treatment issues – from rampant wage theft, devaluing of their work with widespread tropes of ‘the unskilled worker’ and disempowerment in asserting their rights related to threats related to their immigration status and lack of knowledge about their protections under the law.
This session will explore the contributions and impact that immigrant workers make in building and fixing our cities, the biggest labor and human rights issues facing this workforce and the business structures unique to the building and construction industry that perpetuate these conditions.
And it will point to how groups from immigrant advocates, public technologists, media organizations,and nonprofits and researchers are fighting back to highlight the scale of the issue, give workers the tools to better understand and assert their labor rights, and push city and state governments to do better on labor rights for immigrant workers and standards enforcement.
Moderator:
Rebecca Greenwald is a strategist and researcher who works with landscape architecture and urban planning firms, artists, and nonprofits and philanthropies. She aims to elevate the work of organizations that are committed to making sure our cities stay authentic, communal, equitable and people-oriented in the midst of significant political, economic and cultural shifts. Rebecca started California-based landscape architecture studio Terremoto’s Land and Labor initiative, pushing to address the industry’s under acknowledgement and compensation of the immigrant workers who build and maintain their projects. Rebecca writes and thinks about urban sociology, equity in design and urban planning, and public space for outlets including Bloomberg CityLab, Metropolis, Fast Company, AIGA Eye on Design, and Next City.
Speakers:
Jenn Round is the Director of Beyond the Bill (formerly the Labor Standards Enforcement Program) at the workplace justice lab at Rutgers University. In this role, she works with agencies, lawmakers, worker organizations, and legal advocates across the U.S. to more effectively protect the rights of low-wage workers. Jenn facilitates partnership-building between enforcement staff and community and worker organizations, and provides hands-on technical assistance to agencies working to transform their enforcement practices to achieve widespread compliance.She is also skilled at analyzing the enforcement powers embedded in labor standards laws and drafting legislation and administrative rules that facilitate the robust implementation of workplace rights.
Michelle Arevalos Franco (Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Ohio State University’s Knowlton School) seeks to cultivate thriving ecological and social relations through the work of landscapes. Critical to this work is the interrogation of race, class, and knowledge stratification inherent to contemporary landscape architecture practice. Franco’s recent publications are informed by her Mexican roots and explore landscape architecture’s dependence on Latinx immigrant labor for construction and maintenance. This work is both academic and activist, calling for institutional and individual reforms within the discipline and illuminating landscape architecture’s complex political and social entanglements with immigration.
Max Siegelbaum is the Co-Founder of Documented, a nonprofit newsroom focused on New York City’s immigrant communities. There he has led the development of their Wage Theft Monitor initiative uncovering and publishing a searchable database of over 11 years of wage theft data from the New York State and US Departments of Labor including over 300,000 proven wage theft claims of over 100,000 workers. Max began his career in post-revolution Egypt, reporting on politics and culture. He is a graduate of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University and has written for local newspapers in Denver and Pittsburgh, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and STAT, among others. His reporting for Documented led to the divestment of millions of public dollars from private prisons and contributed to policy changes in New York State. He has won awards from the Deadline Club, the Edward R. Murrow awards and was nominated for a Livingston Award.
Rodrigo Camarena is the Director of Justicia Lab, Pro Bono Net’s immigrant justice technology lab, and a nonprofit legal tech initiative whose mission is to transform immigrant justice through collaboration, creativity, and technology.
Justicia Lab works hand in hand with immigrants and their advocates to identify common challenges and incubate scalable digital tools to advance help immigrants navigate the immigration system, find workplace justice, and more. Justicia Lab has developed over a dozen immigrant justice legal tools to scale and support the work of advocates and bridge the justice gap, helping over 500,000 people find critical immigration information and relief. In April Justicia Lab launched JusticiaLab.AI, the world’s first non-profit AI lab for immigrant justice.